It was a beautiful chapter in both their lives, and the last sentimental episode for each. For, after she became fifty years old, Sarah Bernhardt became more and more a worker, an apostle of energy, and less and less the ardent lover.
Her affair with Edmond Rostand was the last great affair of passion in the life of Sarah Bernhardt.
It merits a chapter to itself.
CHAPTER XXIX
The first time Sarah Bernhardt’s name was publicly linked with that of Edmond Rostand was prior to the production of L’Aiglon.
Sarah still pursued her studies as a sculptress, though not so assiduously as before. Sometimes a whole year would go by without her putting chisel to stone, and then she would have a burst of trenchant energy and work furiously on a bust for days and nights together.
She was possessed of great determination, a trait which is generally allied to obstinacy, and she was remarkable among her friends for always finishing anything she started. She might, in the fits of temper which now were becoming rarer, break her sculptures or rip up her paintings after she had finished them, but she invariably completed them first.
She liked to have famous men to pose for her. She seized on Victorien Sardou, a man of great irritability—as demonstrated by his letters reproduced in a previous chapter—and compelled the great dramatist to sit for her twenty-one times, during which she completed her famous bust of him in black marble. This is considered by many to have been her finest work.
Occasionally, when people refused to sit for her or pleaded various excuses, she would trick them into submission. This was the way she managed to get Edmond Rostand and Maurice Maeterlinck to pose together.